December 2007

December 28, 2007

Colorado Springs Unemployment is at 3.8%. We just had a third consecutive year of positive job growth.

Demographically, more buying power is coming online than every before.

We have friends in China and Abu Dhabi willing to bail us out of our subprime credit-crunch idiocy.

Our national savings rate is 0.5% and economics are worried about stagflation.

Any commentator (Lewis Black to Dave Ramsey) is given abundant material to go nuts with this short list above.

The economy is sound it seems only to the Bush Administration's Executive and his mouthpiece. A colleague predicted, and I think to a degree pretty accurately, that as the spring wears on and the eventual GOP and Democratic contenders stop eating-their-own and start taking swings at each other, that the economy will become the central issue of the campaign. Where I disagree is that the democratic surge will result in more bad feelings about the crappy economy. That will certainly happen if Hillary gets the nod. It will probably happen if Edwards gets the nod. I think the opposite happens if Obama gets the nod.

Here's an idea, capitalists: Obama, 2008. Che Gueverra will not be his running mate.

Now really, I am a political person, but a New Year's Resolution (hold you laughter until given the go-ahead...) is swearing off agendas (... now). So for December 28th at least, this isn't a motivating rally for go-go-Obama. It's just an examination of the American psyche. And a guesstimate as to what Obama would do to that psyche. Notice I don't say "capitalize" on. This is the product being the brand that we're talking about, not the other way around.

America is sick of Bush (duh). I'm sick of the Clintons (I know some who aren't, but c'mon, how excited can anyone be about Hillary right now?). America is sick of being lied to, mislead (they're not the same, they're twins from the same womb), befuddled, and having it's brand drained to India, China, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, the aforementioned UAE, Japan, Signapore and even New Zealand (George Lucas, where art thou progeny?). Sarcozy is starting to make being French look at least intriguing (Henry Thierry doesn't hurt either). Russia has a despot at the helm, but they are starting to get their crap together. What has always been different about America, especially when compared to Europe, is that America is a country founded on ideas. Now we're founded on pragmatism, production and end-results. We are not founded on process. We are not an American Experiment. We are not an audacious nation that bombs the hell out of it's enemies... and then goes and re-builds the same enemies.

Our economy, by psychological standards, is in the doldrums. By measurable standards, we're not. But people aren't buying year-end car discounts. They're holding out for deeper discounts at Wal*Mart. In my biz, they're not buying homes. Why? Because they don't feel like it. Hey, have they been given a lick of hope politically in the last 10 years? I was a Clintonista. A proud one. That legacy was squandered on lies. The last eight years have been squandered on polarization and lies.

What Obama brings is a lot of blessed inexperience. That's right: blessed inexperience. He's got no foreign policy experience. He's never run anything other than his check book. He doesn't like ties. He snorted blow. He ain't from anywhere. He's a chiseled sexpot romping in the surf.

The Man is America. He is raw, bold, naked, inspirational, let's talk about ideas America. He is dignity from depravity. He's the best orator since Reagan, a strange comparison, but he's far less calculating and far more likely to trip over his own promises. Thank God. He's real. He's not a great writer. He's a great speaker. Give me the former.

America's obsession with disposable, pre-packaged, by-committee, sanitized, homogenized, safe-bets has left us a nation of quasi-investors, chronic-over-spenders, boob-tube-depressed, over-medicated, understudies of blandness. We did invent the internet (risky... communicating with other people?). We did invent personal computing (risky... who would work outside the office, who would transmit data that wasn't a PhD engineer?). We did invent most of modern medicine (risky,,, huge capital investments, experimentation, etc.). We did invent air travel (uh... risky). Shall we talk about lightbulbs? But we have the population with the lowest likelihood of passport use among industrialized nations (guilty as charged). We are training the world's doctors in medicine at our schools and then they return home to innovate new break through treatments. We've got Macs, but the iPhone happened a half decade earlier in Japan. I saw it with my own eyes on that one international trip I took (ever). Just think: it was early 2002. We were running late on a cross-country train trip. Our tour guide pulled out her phone and found a different Shinkasen schedule that would get us to Norita on time for our 10 hour trip back across the Pacific. Almost that entire sentence is impossible anywhere in the Western US today. The internet now allows corporate recruiters for jobs in Boulder to stockpile hundreds of candidates into a databank and call them from Bangalore to their home in the Colorado Springs suburbs during the dinner hour. It's the same obnoxious call an American recruiter would make, but this recruiter has a bigger bundle of candidates to sell and is willing to work from 9 pm to 7 am.

Capitalists: this is the drumbeat of dullness. A green economy is the promise of radical innovation unseen since the space program. A racially-diversified global workforce promises innovation unseen in history. Think about 1st Century Rome. Maybe not the best role model for social justice, political progress, etc., but Rome was phenomenal because it was inclusive. Augustine was born in the Roman Empire... in Africa. It was the exchange of ideas writ large.

America has been taught: don't take risks, eliminate your enemies, look out for yourself, take advantage of any personalized situation you can, buy, buy, buy. Most of the Democratic candidates maintain that status quo. Everyone of the Republican candidates maintain that status quo. Tax breaks, work programs, seed money for innovation, none of that will have any creative impact: without let's risk-our-ass-and-so-what-if-we-fail leadership. Barrack Obama does not belong in this field of candidates. He's a black man who did dope who was raised by his mom, who is as much from Chicago as Hillary is from New York... and yet... isn't it beautiful that someone with both the cajones and all the reasons to fail... isn't?

Teddy Roosevelt laid out just how audacious and goofy us Americans were in his famous speech quoting the "man in the arena", the risk taker who knows the spirit of the fight, the glories as well as the blood. Teddy gave this speech not as president, but as a pre-Bull-Mooser to the Sorbonne Academy in Paris in 1910. He had nothing to gain from this speech other than "check this out... here's where I come from". His audience was French. He was making a point to the continentals as bold as the Great White Fleet: "we're a little goofy, a lot arrogant, and we don't tinker, we go all-out. Y'all best take notice." It was done with an impish glimmer rather than "for us or against us". It was claiming ideas rather than claiming territory (TR did some of that too). Teddy had been a Lt. Governor, a Police Chief and an Assistant Secretary of the Navy before he became Vice President. It was an audacious, meteoric rise. He had enemies on every fence of every stripe, in coal mines and on Wall Street. He did a lot of stupid stuff. Our Conservation President killed 300 animals on his African Safari.

He was one of the great risk takers in American history, let alone political history. He made us the nation of dewy-eyed dreamers that we are. The America 100 years after he left office has a beer gut, a brain gut, a courage gut. This is no slam at the soldier who serves his nation over seas. It's at the every man that doesn't leave his couch, that spends time on his football picks and not his marriage, that votes the party line that wants for much and needs nothing.

The Obama Market 2008 is not about turning the tides for a single year. It's about hope. Women look to men for hope in relationships. They're over 50% of the population. Given our present malaise, do you think we could build an economy on hope? We haven't had an everyman in office since Lincoln. Our present economy is not bad. But it's the source of frustration and consternation because so much of our exalted American edge, that thing that defines us as "those crazy Americans" who launch rockets to the moon, end global wars, give women the vote and design Google... we are losing the hope to do this each and every year we move onward and allow conventional wisdom to elect our presidents and commissioners and school board sitters.

Obama is not a safe choice. He's not a logical choice. He's not an experienced choice. That's why we bloody need him.

December 20, 2007

There are some weird anomalies to Colorado Springs. We are one of the most anti-tax, pro-business communities in North America. We have a huge population of military pensioners. We have the highest number of four-bedroom home-owners per capita in the United States. How do any of those have to do with quality of life? Especially when we have an extremely confusing gridwork of roads, mass transit that runs (essentially) by bus only between here and Denver and not locally, and an airport that is "one-stop from the world!" (now THAT was a helluva advertising campaign!).

John Kenneth Galbraith credited himself with coining the phrase "conventional wisdom". Hearing his words courtesy the authors of Freakenomics confirmed a long-time suspicion I had about the whole concept: it ain't a compliment. Galbraith, like Godin, was a demographer more than a specialist in their "specialty". Seth Godin can't tell you how to create spin; he can tell you to simply kick-ass at what you do and where to plant the seeds of organic growth. Galbraith wasn't one for formulas; he was one for behavior. He understood what the Cold War did to America. He understood the psychology of Wall Street. He witnessed, documented, critiqued, chewed-on and digested the mass actions of "the herd" and saw that the population had good intentions... but maybe not such good outcomes. He spoke about the average citizens inability to account for the variables of economy, that they eventually grew found it "mentally tiring" and so the herd gripped a raft of common consensus, claimed it to be good, and said "we don't have the brains to do much else." It's like Eyore talking about Pooh Bear and friends "no brains at all, just some gray fluff blown in their heads by accident" (what was A.A. Milne smoking, and why does my four-year old already find that hilarious?).

When you start a value proposition, you have to keep it simple. Interestingly, the Defense Department decided to position an additional 4800 soliders at Fort Carson by 2013. The reason? Quality of Life. Yep. The same folks who decided that a third or FOURTH tour in Baghdad would be good for the ol' family unit decided that Colorado Springs and that crisp mountain air would be good for quality of life. "Hey, Daddy is in the Sand Pit again, but look Mommy, a big purple mountain!" How far does quality of life go?

According to conventional wisdom, pretty darn far...

Why are Euros buying up South Beach like crazy?

Why is Salt Lake (freaking Salt Lake!) selling better than any other western market right now?

The answer: quality of life. But that quality of life comes via the miracle of geography. Miami is the gateway to Latin America, a diffusion of culture, warm temperatures, danger, surf and general cool (but that cool is a byproduct, not indigenous). The Wahsatch front is beautiful and puts the powderhound within 50 minutes of truly world class snow. The angler is the same distance from obscene trout fishing. When Money Magazine rated Colorado Springs The Best Large City in America in 2006, that gauge was in regard to "quality of life."

So my two questions: 1.) Did the rest of America just take a year off in 2006? Or what REALLY Defines Quality of Life? 2.) Is Quality of life just some figment of Conventional Wisdom? Or is there really something there, down-deep, that has to do with quality... and not the opportunity for quantity?

What's the Value Proposition of Colorado Springs? God help me, "low taxes, good schools, 300 days of sunshine." If Mitt Romney ran a Chamber of Commerce... There is something here that is good, that is worth savoring, worth fighting for. What...is...it?

December 18, 2007

This morning on KRCC they reported locally on a $50,000 shortfall expected by the Salvation Army.

Now in no way am I against the Salvation Army, their mission, or their efforts in requesting cash via a friendly permission-marketing approach. But what I found sort of shocking were some (not all) of the reasons they thought they had a shortfall.

First, there is some economic doom and gloom. That does make sense. Our unemployment is less than 4%, we’re positive in job growth for the year, but have you ever seen such funk accompany such prosperity? The pulse of the people is not terribly positive this holiday season. That one’s legit.

The other one though didn’t make a lot of sense: they associated the problem with people not carrying much cash on them, and that this was also tied to the economy. This almost borders on a completely unfortunate assumption. It’s unfortunate because the Salvation Army apparently believes that their collection model is still in tune with American consumer habits. America has a 0.5% national savings rate. To assume people are good with their cash when money is tight isn’t practical. Next to no one saves money as it is, so why would they intentionally carry less cash during the holidays? Is the sub-prime disaster a lesson being heeded by the population or more deeply symptomatic of the real America? But even worse: cash? What’s that?

The Salvation Army bell-ringer is an endearing image of Holiday Americana. But we are now acclimated to buying something, if not a lot of things, online. Grocery stores will take delivery orders online and deliver it to your door. You get miles on your credit card. How do you buy things via PayPal? With your… When Safeway asks “would you like to make a donation to breast cancer research?” what are you paying with? Your… When you make a donation at the red kettle, what can you NOT use? Your…

It’s really weird. We’re not a spare change society anymore. The plasticization of America is visible in do-it-yourself car washes, which mostly now take, what? It’s visible in downtown parking passes, which you can buy with your….what? We have an all-too easy reliance on easy answers. Plastic is in my pocket: spend. The economy is weak... people must not be carrying cash. One of these is true. One is not. They're not the same.
So when things tip over the edge, and we go from a cash and change society, to an 80 to 90% plastic society, how do you change your cash-only-based-model?

Here’s an idea for the Salvation Army: unite with Amazon. Unite with King Soopers. iTunes will do this in a heartbeat. Migrate online. Make a Christmas partner. Make a Southwest Airlines style ringing-bell-jingle. Or build your site as a portal to sponsoring local nline resources of holiday cheer. Make it easy for the consumer to buy: hope. Confirm the consumer-intuition to migrate online and away from brick and mortar. Find a way to politely phrase “can you help fill the red kettle this year?” with some sort of widget. The shipping and billing zip codes are already there… they’ll know where to send the donation.

December 17, 2007

When Isaiah and Jeremiah, my almost two-year old twins were born, we had a problem: a diaper problem. You probably already get the idea: we had twin boys who were being nursed every 2 hours and 40 minutes. Both of 'em. Anyone with a child who nursed knows the routine: Baby wakes, has some food, change diaper, a little active-awake time, settle baby down for a 60 to 90 minute nap. Now double. That's nine diapers a day for a newborn. For preemie twins, that's 18 diapers a day. That's 18 if there are no blowouts. That's 18 if you're not hallucinating in the middle of the night while you change diaper 14, or 19, or 26. That's 18 if you don't get a pee shower while changing Junior. That's also 18 very tiny diapers. And that's where our diaper problem got a little out of control.

Pampers run round one of our diaper problem for two reasons: one, they fit our non-round bottomed boys well and were the least likely to blow-out. Function won over price. But here's the other: they made them in size Preemie. For the non-childrened of the world, there are several sizes of disposable diapers relating to the size of your child, essentially 1 through 6 (although we have friends whose well-mannered children only advanced to a couple boxes of 3's and 4's before they got interested in the potty). For little dudes, there is size N, for Newborn, and they make these in quantities of up to 80 (for some reason the big kid diapers come in cargo-van size boxes of 196 at the membership stores). But our little guys were extra-newbie, and they needed size P (sub-newborn or Preemie). Grocery stores and even Wal-Mart rarely' carry the larger size N, so you can forget about P. Only Babies R Us carried P anywhere in a town of almost 600,000... and there is one store on the other end of town. Extra-worse, Pampers only made them in packages of 40. Extra-extra-worse, they weren't even on the Babies R Us website when the twins were born.

So back to the math: 18 diapers a day if we remain functional, able and competent in our ability to change and Momma doesn't have any spicy or gassy food to encourage butt-blows: packages of 40. I could drive to Babies R Us every two days for a month while our less than five pound kids put on some weight, or buy lots of 20 at a time.

Now what's really weird with this problem is that America has an increasing incidence of multiple births. It used to be 1 in 55, and now due to fertility treatments and aging mothers (among other reasons), it is one in 36. Twins tend to be smaller since, hey, the womb is only so big. So most twins are in the 6 pound to less category, meaning that they qualify for the size N Newborn dipes or the rarer and harder to find P. Yet one store in town carries them? Adding a final level of insult, this specialized, lightweight box for the babies with micro-fannies cost about 30% more per diaper than any other size.

This is the story of a pain in the butt: making things extra hard when things are already difficult.

Last year, 75% of people buying a home found the experience "very stressful"... or worse. What's really weird is that American's buy more homes every year, they stay in their residence less and they have greater expectations of what a home can do for them, their financial wealth, even their self-esteem. When housing price go down, thus allowing more people to play, it creates a weird sort of panic. Are you seeing any of the parallels I'm seeing between these two scenarios?

If I had known I was going to have a diaper problem, I certainly would have stocked up, or found ways of stockpiling Y2K levels of Size P diapers. I didn't. No one warned me. Memorial Hospital let us empty out the crib area when we left and we made off with about 120 diapers. Those lasted 6 days. Now that we don't have our diaper problem any longer, we are loyal Kirkland customers (Costco). It's worth it to get the same quality for less that does what it's supposed to (hold the poo and pee in the diaper). We have no loyalty to Pampers for their worry-free containment process; we do have animosity that they made their product in packages that were too small, too unavailable and more expensive than the big kid sizes.

We live in a customized society mostly of wants. Some weird problems happen whenever we move to needs.

December 16, 2007

It's just another day of the natural weirdness of Colorado Springs. The neighborhood "big buck," a thick-necked five-pointer is dozing underneath my big Ponderosa. And he's about to die. Someone hit him with a car, his front left leg is dangling worthlessly underneath his body and he's licking it in the faint hopes that his saliva will make it better. His back legs bow drastically inward each time he stands to eat some dry grass, take a dump, hobble a few feet, and then flop back to the ground. But for now he's chilling out, grabbing a sun beam, and posing for pictures... while the Division of Wildlife officers take their time in reporting for an euthanasia appointment.

Adding to the overall atmosphere, I'm sitting here importing music onto iTunes for a new workout playlist and Amy declares that she "has to go and take a nap." I ask if she wants me to wake her when the wildlife crew got here. "No way," she says. This from the woman who is "captured" by wilderness. This from the woman whose dream is to be an organic farmer. This from a woman who was eating Genoa Salami.

Morgan won't answer his phone. I was wondering if he might want to come by with his bow. Good boy for not answering. Happy Anniversary, dog.

"Rumor" (I can't verify, but some I know can) that 80919 dear taste especially bad. There's probably the usual levels of hopped-up testosterone in this big boy, the rut's done and he still has his huge rack while the spikes are shedding theirs, but as majestic and beautiful as he is, our deer are antifreeze-lickers. They're more common than squirrels and have no fear of humans. Bucks in heat are the number one cause of death of dogs in our neighborhood. So if you think this post is a little "inhumane" or lacking sympathy for the pater familias of Pinecliff, just remember this: Michael Vick and Bucky? They got a lot in common. For the PETA hold-outs: this buck probably has claimed personal property from several Pinecliff residents... property not in line with patio furniture, Christmas lights or other such things, but instead Fido, Buffy, and Muffin, cute, precious little arfers left to bark in neighbor's backyards. They died impaled on his, or his rivals' antler. We average five to six a year.

So whose side you on? The macro-build-up of reclaimed automotive coolants, musk and majesty? Or "Bear" the wonder-poodle?

December 12, 2007

In Velvet Elvis, Rob Bell starts his re-painting of the Christian faith with a ridiculous and wonderful example: a trampoline. To summarize, a trampoline is not the end-all, be-all, and it's not a tool. It's an instrument of wonder. My son Andrew got on a tramp (without us seeing him get on) at 2. Nothing brings him joy more than bouncing. Isaiah and Jeremiah aren't allowed on tramps yet, they're almost two, but then bounce castles are their blast, and they've been going in those since they were 13 months old. I think Jer started walking the week before his first rubber adventure. It's not a lot of fun to bounce alone, but it's something wonderful to invite another soul onto, a wonder that you get to live and share and breathe with another person. For Rob, it's his journey with Jesus. For my boys, it gives me chills to think that such a metaphor so readily exists to describe a life of faith.

Another image that shakes me to the bones is another image of simplicity. In the book (note the sarcasm in the title) "So you want to Live in Hawai'i, it describes a family living on the northeast shore of The Big Island. They have some young kids and enjoy the super slow speed of life, an hour to Hilo, a couple hours to Kona, and no real TV reception. At night, instead of watching reruns, they all gather on the giant trampoline in the yard and watch the stars come out. In that ink black sky where the nearest powerful lights are on Waikiki a few hundred miles west, beneath some of the cleanest air on the planet, they watch the heavens. They watch wonder.

Having just read this passage and while holding my son Jeremiah this morning, I looked out into my backyard and looked at the giant expanse of dead lawn. I don't know if this is a once-living-now-dead-metaphor for my own home, but this is the place where the previous owners had dug a pit, and then filled it in with rock, because they were in violation of the covenants due to a visible... you guessed it... trampoline.

I never knew what Bono meant when he sang during "Party Girl" "I know a boy, a boy called Trampoline, you know what I mean." I probably still don't. But today I have a better idea.

I'm in the midst of stockpiling buyers and sellers for the new year, with no one interested in doing anything right now during the holidays. It's a dry season financially, but grand because it really allows me to wallow inside the strange walls my life now inhabits and examine the cracks and crevices. I met an old friend this morning and he introduced me to a new friend. At the end of the conversation, I was bouncing, sort of good, sort of bad. As Rob would also say, that's the important part of a journey, journeying into uncharted territory. And we live in uncharted territory.

So my 10 o'clock appointment results in a contract. Finally. My first in two months. Oh, and for fun, they need me to a list another property and help a family member buy another property. Like now. At PF Chang's, I see the female Young Life leader that lead both my wife and I to Christ 15 years ago. She doesn't live here, but she was meeting another Young Lifer for lunch. This is one of the funniest people I've met in my life, but also the most genuine and wonderful. She is a saint among sinners, yet conducts herself as the perfect guerilla evangelist that she is. I knew the Young Life exec she was meeting too, and he remembered me because of my wife. I told him about my friend's place in my life, and told her to love on her extra well. I got to the office and called a listing prospect and after probably a 30 minute call, natual, unforced, Q&A, back and forth, I probably have the listing. Probably. Nothing's nailed. Nothing's certain. But what the heck is this? After three months of drought, not a flood, but a fertile, gentle rain? Conventional wisdom says that when she breaks, Robert Plant's wailing about the levee... instead, this is kind. This is gentle. This is life-giving.

When I worked in the fly fishing industry, there was a guy named Peter in Montreal who worked at a shop called Boutique Classique Angler. He was awesome, a real chatter, who described epic battles on the Miramichi with 40 pound Atlantic Salmon. When I moved to Colorado Springs, he was one of the people I missed not speaking with regularly the most, and I mailed him a Christmas card for the heck of it. On Christmas Eve that year he called me, ecstatic that I sent him a Christmas Card. "I got chore card-uh, and I taught to meself, Jumpin' Jesus, izz Ben! MARE-ee Chrizzmaz to you too, dammit!"

Peter's favorite exclamation, Jumping Jesus, was bouncing through my head today. It doesn't really define anything. It just encaspulates. It smiles back. I don't get it. But I don't need to.

We have a neighbor, a 7th grader who is extremely entrepreneurial. This summer she posted signs door-to-door throughout the neighborhood that she was available for darn near anything: fish and ferret watching, dog-walkng, minor-supervised baby-watching, mail and paper pick-up on vacation, etc. As the parents of three children 4 and under (the twins are 2 in February), this was like a little kiss from God on our front doorstep. See? Someone does want to help.

Our children love her and she tags along on all sorts of errands when Amy needs that third or fourth hand. Yesterday was no exception: a trip to Safeway with three little squirts. Andrew has this habit of everytime we go to this Safeway, he HAS to go to the bathroom. Of course, that happened yesterday. So while our neighborhood freind watched the twins, Amy took Andrew to the bathroom. While in the bathroom, she realized that our precocious, go-go-go 4 year-old had not changed his underwear... in three days. It was his favorite pair afterall, and from the perspective of a 4 year-old, one pair of Power Ranger Boxers is NOT the same as Bob the Builder... Power Rangers fight, Bob is outgrown.

Amy asked Andrew to please make sure that when he got home he put on fresh undies, because, ahem, he was a little less than fresh himself. Andrew looked straight at her and replied with this perfectly logical gameplan: "Mom, I'm going to wear these undies everyday until Easter, and when Easter comes, I'm going to give them to Jesus, and he's going to wear them around."

I just finished reading David James Duncan's God Laughs and Plays and in his second chapter ("Wonder, Yogi, Gladly") he talks about the Urban Legend of "Gladly the Cross-eyed Bear"... I wont' ruin it for you but this is such an outstanding and dangerous book, it's worth seeking it out at Barnes and Noble and just reading this quick chapter. But that's my spolier alert. If you don't want to know what he writes, stop right HERE.

Duncan's analysis of the Urban Legend is what makes Duncan so special. He asks questions, never accepting ANYTHING at face value. Here's his question: Does a God whose death on the cross is savage and ugly and brutal, find heresy in a child naming his teddy bear "Gladly?" Because his little literal mind is wrapped around the hymn he sings at Sunday School "Gladly the Cross I'd Bear" and names his very own cross-eyed bear "Gladly?" Or does God do what we do: and laugh. Laugh hard. Laugh with great glee.

It's a great question. And if this makes you uncomfortable, remember Abraham and Sarah. Their child's name? Isaac: Laughter. Sarah can't believe she'll have a child north of 90 and God's reply is "I know. Pretty crazy huh? Wild enough for you? A great joke, isn't it, for God and man to laugh over? Tell you what, let's go one better: let's name him Isaac."

So I asked Andrew at home last evening if Jesus would fit in his underwear. Unthwarted he said "good one, Dad," not scolding my very narrow, very literal, very-compartmentalized definition of how big or small Jesus might make himself this April to fit into the Power Ranger boxer shorts from... well.. not heaven... but instead, Andrew appreciated my attempt to enter his fun, laughter-filled world of imagination... despite my own ability to play by the rules. If Jesus is given a gift, will He not receive it? Even if they are gnarly 4T Boxers? And since He is King of Kings, He can probably find some way to either purify them, not be bothered by them... or fit into them. But the patience of Andrew with my own inconsistent logic was beautiful. "Good one, Dad."